I’m very pleased to let our members and our partners know that we are expanding the Empire Avenue team. Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Brad Grier joining our team full time to take on the role of Director of Social Media and Community Management. Well now I’m pleased to introduce two more senior members we are adding to our team and growing our full-time complement. Both individuals have been helping us previously in a part time capacity and will have no issues fitting in with our team and culture and hitting the ground running!

Ric Williams, VP Strategy and Business Development
Ric joins us from Canadian based startup Baby Gourmet where he led the company’s strategy for building out the marketing and retail distribution from nothing to over 2,500 retail stores across North America and a growing online loyalty platform for online and offline shoppers.

Many of us at Empire Avenue had a chance to work with Ric at BioWare, now a Division and Label of Electronic Arts, where he served as Senior Director of Global Product Marketing. Ric’s resume is filled with impressive companies such as Motorola, Yoplait and Eidos in varying roles from manufacturing to Marketing leadership.

Not only does Ric understand the social media platform and gamification space, but he also understands the business and strategic challenges we face as we create a global Empire Avenue that will be one of the foremost destination sites and apps in the world. Ric has started the process of building out our business partnerships from Luxury Items to promotional missions driving engagement to even more.

Please drop him a line if you want to get involved at bizdev@empireavenue.com. Adding to our already very international world view, Ric and family hail from Australia.

Craig Miller, Chief Technical Officer
Craig is probably one of the most accomplished technologists I know. For the last decade he has helped BioWare grow from a small web site and forum with less than a few thousand weekly users to a massively successful online destination for millions of users around the world.

While at BioWare, he scaled the systems and network to create an amazing platform with an incredible uptime, serving terabytes of graphical and game data, and meeting the demands of millions of consumers.

With Craig on board, I’m confident in our ability to scale Empire Avenue to millions of users around the world with blistering performance and as much up time as possible.